Same Old Tigers, Or Something New? Hard To Tell

There’s a particular brand of misery that only Richmond supporters truly understand, and it has nothing to do with getting flogged. It’s the creeping, low-grade dread of watching your club lose a forgettable game against another bad team — and not being entirely sure what to feel about it.

Sunday’s defeat to North Melbourne was that game. Precise in its mediocrity. Engineered, almost, for maximum tedium. And somewhere in the Punt Road cheer squad, a thousand Richmond fans stared into the middle distance and thought: is this it? Is this the rebuild?

Let’s Talk About That Game

To be fair to the Tigers — a sentence I’ve typed so many times in the last three years it’s started to feel like a coping mechanism — they weren’t disgraced. They weren’t outclassed. North Melbourne are a genuine bottom-four side and Richmond went toe-to-toe with them for large parts of the afternoon.

But that’s not exactly a glowing endorsement, is it. Going toe-to-toe with a Kangaroos team that’s been in a rebuild longer than some of our current players have been alive is not where the Richmond Football Club expected to be after three premierships in four years.

The game itself was blighted by the kind of cynical, results-first coaching that produces uncontested marks, clogged corridors and the sort of football that makes you check your phone every four minutes just to confirm that yes, time is still passing. Both teams played like they were terrified of losing rather than remotely interested in winning. The result was about as appetising as a sausage roll left on a tray from the first quarter.

The Older Guys Who Looked Elsewhere

This is the uncomfortable bit. A few of Richmond’s older, more experienced players looked — and I say this with the affection of someone who has cheered for them through thick and very thick — like men whose minds were already on the post-career podcast circuit.

That’s not a character assassination. These are blokes who’ve been through the full emotional spectrum with this club. Finals, flags, the death of a teammate, the carousel of coaches that followed. It’s a lot. But when a rebuild is genuinely underway, you need the experienced heads to drag the young ones forward, not drift towards the exit.

I’m not naming names — and frankly the club knows who they are — but there’s a version of Richmond’s current list where the veterans are the engine room of the rebuild, and there’s a version where they’re treading water until someone taps them on the shoulder. Sunday occasionally looked like the second version.

But Wait — The Kids Aren’t Awful

Here’s where the gallows humour gets complicated. Because if you squint past the flatness of the result and the general tedium of the occasion, there were genuine bright spots in the young Richmond contingent.

Their draftees and young-listed players are, by and large, doing what you want young players to do: competing hard, making mistakes with intent, and occasionally doing something that makes you sit up straighter in your seat. The midfield brigade is raw, sure — like, agricultural raw — but there’s athleticism there, and more importantly, there’s clearly a system being implemented.

It’s just very, very hard to see that system produce results right now. Which is, of course, exactly what a rebuild looks like from the inside. Doesn’t make it less maddening.

The North Game vs The West Coast Game

Richmond knocked over West Coast back in May in a game that — against all reasonable expectation — was actually worth watching. Two bottom-table sides, both throwing the ball around, both genuinely contesting. It had energy.

Sunday against the Roos was the opposite. And the difference, I think, comes down to what both teams were trying to do. The West Coast game felt liberated. The North game felt like two clubs trying not to lose rather than trying to win.

That’s a coaching choice — on both sides — and while I understand the logic of it, I can’t say I enjoyed the output. If rebuilding clubs are going to be honest about what they’re doing, they should probably accept that playing for wins-against-the-odds produces better long-term culture than playing not-to-lose. You’d hope Adem Yze has that memo. Based on recent weeks, it’s a little unclear.

So Is The Rebuild Actually Working?

This is the question nobody at Richmond wants to answer directly because the honest answer is: probably, sort of, we think, give it time.

Draft capital is accumulating. The list is getting younger without falling completely off a cliff. There are players in the system who project as genuine contributors in three years. Adem Yze is, by all accounts, doing a steady if unspectacular job in difficult circumstances — and I mean that genuinely, not sarcastically, which should tell you how far I’ve come emotionally since the Hardwick farewell.

But the honest counter-argument is that rebuilds in modern AFL are extraordinarily hard to pull off, and a club with Richmond’s salary cap legacy from the golden era faces specific structural challenges that don’t go away quickly. The money locked up in ageing contracts — the inevitable consequence of three flags — restricts flexibility. It constrains the ability to build fast.

And here’s the bit that actually keeps me up at night: North Melbourne have been rebuilding for what feels like a geological era, and they’ve only recently started to show genuine signs of life. How many more Sunday afternnoons in the outer am I prepared to sit through before Richmond’s equivalent breakthrough moment?

The answer, obviously, is as many as it takes. I’m Richmond. We wait.

What They Need Before September Becomes Relevant Again

Let me be specific, because vague doom-saying is the lazy version of this column and I have standards — low ones, but standards.

• A genuine number-one forward. Richmond’s forward structure currently looks like a committee designed it. They need a focal point who commands a tag and stretches defences — and it needs to come from within or via a trade because the draft won’t produce it fast enough.
• A settled midfield trio. We see flashes of potential through the middle but not consistency. Two or three of the younger mids need to put together extended runs of good football, not just good quarters.
• Honest conversations about the old guard. Nobody loves these conversations. The players don’t, the supporters don’t, the football department really doesn’t. But they have to happen — respectfully, privately, with class — because a rebuild with too many half-committed veterans is just a slow decline with better intentions.
• A game that doesn’t make me want to alphabetise my spice rack at three-quarter time. This one might be the most urgent.

The Long View

I’ve been watching the Tigers long enough to remember when September felt like something that happened to other clubs. Then we won three of them in four years and I briefly forgot how to be adequately miserable. Now I’m relearning.

The thing is — and I mean this — I still believe in what Adem Yze is building. I think the club’s list management has been more thoughtful in the last eighteen months than the narrative gives it credit for. And I think there are genuine footballers in yellow and black who, in two or three years, will make current Richmond supporters feel about them the way we felt about Dustin Martin in 2014: like we’re watching something special take shape.

We’re just not there yet. Not by a stretch. Sunday was a reminder that the distance between where Richmond currently sits and where Richmond expects to be is still very, very long.

But we’ve been patient before. The lean years before 2017 were long and occasionally humiliating, and then — then — everything changed in the most extraordinary way.

So I’ll keep watching. I’ll keep wincing. I’ll keep trying to find meaning in uncontested marks and uninspiring draws and Sunday afternoon losses to the Kangaroos.

Because that’s what you do when you barrack for Richmond. You wait for the turn, and you trust that it’s coming.

Even if this week it really, really didn’t look like it.